Holly Lisle's Create A World Clinic

by Holly Lisle

PENDING AN AMAZON-UPGRADABLE UPDATE WITH EASIER ACCESS TO ALL WORKSHEETS, CLASSROOM, and FORUM, THIS CLASS WILL NOW BE PRICED AT $3.99 PERMANENTLY.Every Fiction Writer Builds Worlds… You know you want to hook your readers on your fiction. You desperately want to build a growing audience of fans who love your characters, your stories, and the world in which you set them. But chances are—unless you're a science fiction or fantasy writer—you're certain that you don't need to do any worldbuilding, because you equate building worlds with sticking a big fantasy map in the front of your book, and writing about aliens, or dwarves and elves and dragons. The truth is, worldbuilding is the process of creating immersive fiction, of making it possible for your reader to experience the suspension of disbelief that allows him to live in your world. Every fiction writer already worldbuilds. Most writers simply do it badly. Because most writers don't think they build worlds in their fiction, the worlds they build by • break their plots • kill their pacing • destroy their conflict • and eliminate their characters' motivation. By learning easy, fast techniques for creating immersive story worlds, you can be the writer whose work wins the readers you want. How easy? How fast? You can build your first world in about five minutes, and I've laid out this course so you can do this just by reading and doing the short workshop in the first chapter. You'll need a single piece of paper and a pen. Open the sample from the course, and begin proving to yourself that you can worldbuild—and that constructing quick, simple, and intentional worlds will make your stories better than you ever dreamed they could be. This course • The 301-page, 70,000-word course… • Divided into SANE techniques—simple worldbuilding to develop immersive plots, conflicts, and characters • And GEEK-DEEP techniques used to write fiction when the world is a character, you want to keep all your readers while switching genres, or if you are writing series fiction… PLUS… • Comprehensive, easy-to use worksheets that allow you to organize your worlds for consistency between books, and so that you can pick up an old series and begin writing in it again • 11 Geek-Deep videos with additional Geek-Deep worksheets • 8 worldbuilding maps used by the author to create several published series (Korre, Matrin, Known Space), including five flat maps and three 3-D maps • Lifetime downloads of in-version course upgrades in PDF, .mobi (Kindle), and .epub formats. • And links in the back of the book to let you get all the extras at no additional cost. When you use Holly Lisle's Create A World Clinic... • You’ll get better stories. • Better characters. • Better plots. • Better description. • Better conflict. • And MUCH better consistency from story to story and book to book. Use the Amazon LOOK INSIDE feature to build your first world in about five minutes...BEFORE you buy. And then discover all the wonderful things you can do with your new world, and the many you'll create next.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

410 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 11, 2014

About the author

Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series.

Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:

“So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived.

“My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.

“It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.”

“Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.

” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’

“The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.

“We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget.

“I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.”

You can find Holly on her personal site:
Hollylisle.com

You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site:
CadenceDrake.com

You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here:
The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.

Reviews

[X · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit I didn't use the book as intended and create a whole world from scratch from the prompts. So only the last third-ish of the book was really what I needed and was looking for.

However it was a very handy reference and gave me ideas of things to consider when worldbuilding - without going too far into the extreme end of worldbuilding endlessly and never bothering to actually write.

[Kara Hartz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I thought it would be from the description. I'm stuck on a WIP with some worldbuilding issues. This didn't help at all. This is written for someone who has no story idea in place yet, and has exercises and worksheets to brainstorm conflict, characters, etc. all building out of the world they are creating. While that could be fun, I'm sure, and there may be a few things from here I end up using later on, it isn't what I needed.
The essential questions did help me a little, and will probably use in the future, but since I don't usually start worldbuilding with no story idea at all, most of the exercises are not useful to me.

As another review noted, I too had to jump through some hoops to get access to the videos, but luckily still had my receipt. It was a little annoying, and the videos added nothing at all to the book. They were of the author showing off stuff she made in Minecraft.

[Dorrie Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Excellent!

Like a lot of writers, I've read more than a few books on writing and I've learned from most of them and yet, they left me wanting more. I would follow directions and hope I got I right and then find myself wondering how to connect all the bits and pieces together, but not with Holly.

Holly gives you detailed instructions with examples and does every exercise with you from start to finish. No more wondering if you're doing things right and Holly makes sure you enjoy the learning experience with her wild imagination and her great sense of humor.

I recommend this for anyone wanting to create better worlds in their writing.

[Nancy Riggs · Rating 1 out of 5]

Make sure to keep your receipt. I didn't and apparently I won't be able to access any of the extras, including the worksheets that are needed to follow the course. Now I've wasted my money. The author only mentions the receipt at the end of the book. Foolishly, I read it through all the way before looking for the links. Now I've cleaned out my email and I'm out of luck.

I am very upset about this - and about the excessive amount of bold font used. I can read. I don't need every fifth sentence emphasized.

[L.S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has some redeeming features, but is better read before you start your novel!